MORROW COUNTY — Local school districts are beginning to open their doors to students during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the virus continues to complicate the picture.

As many schools in the region bring in small groups of students in a limited capacity, the Oregon Health Authority is reporting six recent cases of COVID-19 that includes staff and students from schools in Irrigon and Heppner. Pendleton has one staff case at Sherwood Heights Elementary School, on top of one the district reported before starting its limited in-person programming.

Pendleton Superintendent Chris Fritsch said Sherwood Heights is returning to a distance learning-only model for now, but the rest of the district’s schools will continue unabated.

In the Morrow County School District’s case, these cases aren’t preventing it from trying to take the next step forward.

‘When can we get back together?’

Morrow County School District has been offering limited in-person instruction to qualifying students in all of its schools, but on Wednesday, Oct. 21, the district sent out a letter to parents stating that all students may soon have an opportunity for in-person instruction.

“On Tuesday, Oct. 20, we were able to meet with Morrow County Public Health to review COVID-19 numbers and present a plan for reopening. From that meeting it was agreed that if we could keep our number of ‘new cases’ to nine or less this week (October 18–24), we will be able to reopen schools on Wednesday, Oct. 28,” the letter stated.

At first glance, the announcement seemed to fly in the face of the Oregon Department of Education’s rules.

According to the state education department, for a school to reopen to all students at all grade levels, the county where the school district is located must have no more than 10 confirmed COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents in a week for three weeks in a row, and less than 5% of tests in the county must come back positive for three weeks.

According to the state’s weekly reporting on the topic, Morrow County had eight cases the week of Oct. 11, working out to 63.1 cases per 100,000, with a test positivity rate above 12%.

But after the state first announced those general guidelines for bringing students back, it has continued to release less strict metrics granting exceptions for certain situations. In Morrow County’s case, Superintendent Dirk Dirksen pointed to a set of metrics allowing for a “hybrid return” for all students in counties that have fewer than 30,000 people and an average population density of less than six people per square mile.

For counties that fit that definition, districts can bring back any students for some in-person learning, as long as they have had 30 or fewer total cases in the past three weeks, with less than half of those cases in the final week of the period. The local health department must also determine that the county is not experiencing “community spread,” meaning contact tracers can’t determine where patients were exposed to the virus.

Dirksen said Morrow County Health Department has indicated that if the county has fewer than 10 cases for the week of Oct. 18, they will fit that definition. If that happens, Dirksen said, they want to jump on the chance to reopen immediately in case the next week brings a higher number of cases and closes that window.

“We can’t pass up this opportunity,” he said.

Dirksen said schools will have different schedules under the hybrid model, but in general, elementary school students will have in-person learning in the morning with students choosing to stay online watching the instruction over video, while the afternoon will involve teachers working with all students online in small groups or individually.

Secondary school students choosing to return to the classroom will stay in a single home room all day, with that teacher acting as a tutor as they interact with other teachers over video.

“With COVID, we don’t want those kids moving around (the building),” Dirksen said. “It’s a lot easier to track for the local health department.”

The district had already been bringing in students who were in special education, have social-emotional needs or trouble accessing the internet for two hours a day under the “limited in-person instruction model” allowed for special groups of students. Previously, Dirksen had said it had been going well, and feedback from families was positive.

“What I’m usually getting is, ‘When can we do more? When can we get back together?’” he said.

Handling outbreaks

Umatilla County Public Health Director Joe Fiumara said Monday, Oct. 19, that the few local outbreaks associated with schools have primarily been isolated cases of the virus and offer at least anecdotal optimism about the efficacy of the current protections in place.

“For the couple that have had the possibility of school exposures, while we are seeing some cases associated, we’re not seeing large spread,” he said. “That indicates the protections that are in place seem to be in the right direction and seem to be working when they are doing in-person activities.”

In addition to, ideally, limiting the potential for the virus to spread in the first place, the protections school districts are employing can expedite the case investigation process for the health department.

While other positive cases of the virus are commonly traced through direct conversations by an employee of the health department with the COVID-positive individual, when a student tests positive, school administrators are able to provide the health department with detailed information about any potential exposures to the virus that may have occurred.

“The school has a blueprint, they have a plan, they have logs, they have cohorts designated,” Fiumara said. “That’s all information we can then use to supplement the investigation. It can help us narrow down exposure periods and what some of the risk of exposure at the site might have been.”

Positive cases at schools are eventually funneled to OHA, which is tallying cases of students and staff at schools where in-person activities have resumed, with the asterisk that not all cases may have come from those activities.

While counties need to meet a set of statistical thresholds that prove the spread of COVID-19 is limited before the state will allow schools to fully reopen, how schools respond to outbreaks is largely left at the discretion of local public health departments.

But an amenable public health department hasn’t assuaged every educator’s concerns.

Contrasting approaches

Umatilla Superintendent Heidi Sipe sits on the state’s Healthy Schools Reopening Council that helps determine the rules that govern what school districts can and cannot do during the pandemic. Sipe said the Oregon Legislature has not created liability protections for school districts that would protect them from a lawsuit arising from a student or employee getting COVID-19 at school.

“If we don’t follow the rules to a ‘T,’ the fallout could be huge, and affect students for generations to come,” she said.

For that reason, Umatilla School District has not returned any students to the classroom yet. Sipe said the district has been “very close” but has not yet met the metrics for limited in-person instruction with special groups, which states no students or staff connected to the district can test positive for COVID-19 in the 14 days prior to opening.

She also said the state is expected to release new metrics very soon, and the district wants to make sure when they reopen, they don’t have to immediately change plans again.

The Hermiston School District brought back special education students on Oct. 19, along with students in the district’s Newcomers program for students who have been in the United States for less than a year. On the first day, Assistant Superintendent Bryn Browning said 79 of the students who were eligible had told the district they were coming back, but some of them did not show up on the first day.

She said the district is following requirements from the Department of Education, including masks, hand-washing when entering a room, keeping desks 6 feet apart and not letting the 10-student cohorts mix with other cohorts.

“We really have done a thorough job of getting staff and students ready because we want this to be successful,” she said.

Laurel Woodward, president of the Hermiston Association of Teachers, said in an email that the association “supports providing our students the safest and most effective learning opportunities.” In response to a question about how well the association feels the district has done in putting protections for teachers in place as students return to schools, Woodward said safety protocols that had been in place since August were revisited ahead of the beginning of limited in-person instruction.

“The association continues to work with the district to resolve any issues that arise,” she said, without specifying what those issues were.

Fiumara and others are hoping some of the early indications that spread of the virus can be limited and effectively traced at schools will open the door for more returns to in-person education sooner rather than later.

After previously establishing a set of metrics that included new virus cases per capita and test positivity rate to evaluate when local school districts could reopen classrooms, the state is now in the process of reevaluating those metrics.

According to Fiumara, earlier this month a regional group consisting of himself, other local health officials, county commissioners and school administrators submitted a proposal with recommendations for what those new metrics could be.

Without offering specifics, Fiumara said the recommendations drew on newly available information and data from other states and countries that have returned students to the classroom already. The suggestions were aimed at safely and effectively easing the uphill battle facing local school districts under the current metrics.

According to the Oregon Health Authority’s latest calculations from Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, Umatilla County recorded 88 cases — or 108.4 cases per 100,000 residents — and a test positivity rate of 14.5%. Since test positivity rate started being recorded July 26, Umatilla County’s lowest recorded rate was 12%.

The Oregon Health Authority reported 550 new cases of COVID-19 across the state on Friday, Oct. 23, the single-highest daily case total reported since the pandemic began. 

From Oct. 17 to Oct. 23, a total of 96 new cases of the virus were reported in Umatilla County. The Umatilla County Public Health Department reported that six residents with the virus were hospitalized at the end of the week. 

On Oct. 19, a 53-year-old man from Umatilla County died after testing positive for the virus on Sept. 27. He had been hospitalized at Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center in Tualatin, the Oregon Health Authority stated in a press release, and the presence of preexisting health conditions was still being confirmed as of Oct. 22.